Week #721
This week we had a look at various services that we use and took a bit of an audit. We constantly get emails from Google about your monthly invoice, then open it and it is zero dollars. For various clients over the years we’ve created Google Maps API keys using our own email. It’s always been well under the free tier of their service so it’s never been an issue. In March 02025, Google is changing their billing tiers so it was time for us to go in and review everything. (What a car crash of a UI/UX to figure things out. When you need to promote your Gemini AI tool to help people navigate your own tool, maybe somethings wrong with your tool?)
We then did the same thing for Heroku. Turn down some services, parked others until they are needed again.
Finally, for another project we’ve been making extensive use of iCloud containers. They have a unique permission system in that there is Public, Shared and Private containers and users have inherited permissions. We changed a few things since we want a public database which can be read by everyone, but by default anyone can write to it, and update any records they created. To solve this, we turned off all but the read permissions and related a new permission role just for ourselves to manage the public database via a web admin tool.
For our tablet/VR project we continue to add content and fix bugs that come-up along the way. There is a soft deadline later this month, so we’re cleaning things-up and reviewing the system closer.
As the end of the year approaches, we started to stub a bunch of articles for the new year. There is a template of topics that we post in January. This week we started to gather the data and flush out the posts with some headings and links as necessary.
Week #722
On Wednesday we had a day long meeting and planning session for our eBike. The group needed a good re-focusing and now we have some next steps for the next few months.
On Thursday we had a call with our Miami project. We’re mostly done with the day-to-day aspects of the coding, but we’re keeping one foot in their camp to help. We had a quick call to brainstorm some scaling issues, reporting tracking/metric ideas, MVP features and others. We might not have all the answers, but sometimes you just need to talk it out and get a second opinion and we’re happy to listen.
It has also been a week of content, content, content. Finishing-up as many todos as we can for review in the tablet/vr app. Things are in a good place: there is more content to come, but we know what’s missing and what’s left todo for next week.
Happy Holidays
This will be the last weeknote we write before the end of the 02024. We have two small things left on our publishing schedule and we’re taking time off for the holidays. We have our December ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter to send and a final article for 02024 to publish.